Connie Willis - Passage

People filed out past him, talking about the flowers, the solo, the casket. “She can’t be gone,” Nina sobbed to a gangly resident, “I can’t believe it.”

“I can’t believe it about fox, can you?” Davis’s message on the answering machine had said. “Warn me before it hits the star,” and Richard hadn’t understood the message at all. “She kept saying, ‘Water,’ ” Vielle had said. “She was really saying, ‘Walter.’ ”

The minister laid a hand on his arm. “Do you wish to say good-bye to the departed?” he whispered. “They’re about to close the casket.” Richard looked up the aisle. Two men in black suits stood by the casket, hands folded in front of them.

“There’ll be a luncheon in the fellowship hall downstairs,” the minister said. “We hope you’ll stay.” He gave Richard’s arm a gentle squeeze and walked up the aisle, nodding to the men as he went. They began moving the spray of flowers.

“The best plan would be to decide in advance what you wanted your last words to be and then memorize them, so you’d be ready,” Joanna had said.

The two men lowered the casket lid.

“Whatever it was must’ve been important,” Mr. Wojakowski had said. “She was in such a hurry to tell you, she almost ran me down.”

“Are you all right?” Eileen said, coming rapidly up the aisle to him.

The men fastened the casket lid shut and began shifting the blanket of flowers so it lay in the center.

“Look, we’re all going to go over to Santeramo’s and get a pizza,” Eileen said, taking his arm and leading him out of the sanctuary and over to the other two nurses. “Why don’t you come with us?”

“No,” he said, looking around for Kit and Vielle. He couldn’t see them.

“It’d do you good,” the nurse who had given him the pamphlet said. “It’d get your mind off it.”

“You need to eat something,” the other nurse said.

“I need to get back to the hospital. Vielle’s giving me a ride back,” he said firmly and set out through the crowd to find her and Kit.

The minister and Joanna’s sister were standing with Mandrake. “—just acknowledging there’s an afterlife isn’t enough,” Joanna’s sister was saying stubbornly to Mandrake. “You have to confess your sins before you can be saved.”

He couldn’t see Vielle anywhere, or Kit. They must have left, or else gone downstairs to the fellowship hall. He started across to the basement steps and ran into Mr. Wojakowski, holding forth to a circle of elderly ladies. “Hiya, Doc,” he said. “Sad, sad thing. I’ve seen a lot of funerals. On the Yorktown, they—”

“When you saw Joanna, that last day,” Richard said, “did she say what she wanted to tell me?”

“Nope. She was in too big a hurry. She didn’t even hear me the first coupla times I yelled at her. ‘Did somebody call battle stations?’ I asked her. At Midway, they’d call battle stations, and boy, did everybody scramble for their tin hats, ’cause they knew in about five minutes all hell’d be breaking loose. They’d run up those gangways so fast they didn’t even take time to put on their pants, scared as rabbits—”

“Joanna was scared?” Richard asked. “She seemed frightened, upset?”

“Joanna? Hell, no. She looked like my bunkmate Frankie Cocelli used to look during a battle. Little skinny guy, looked like you could snap him in two, but not afraid of anything. ‘Let me at ’em!’ he’d shout when the sirens went, and go tearing off like he couldn’t wait to get shot at. Did, too. Did I ever tell you how he got it? This Jap Zero—?”

“And that’s how Joanna looked?” Richard persisted. “Eager? Excited?”

“Yeah. She said she had to go find you, that she had something important to tell you.”

“But she didn’t say what?”

“Nope. So anyway, this Zero—”

Richard spotted Vielle, just inside the door. “Excuse me,” he said and edged his way through the crowd to her. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

“I was outside with Kit. She had to take her uncle home,” Vielle said. “He kept asking her who’d died, over and over.” She shook her head. “Poor man. Or maybe he’s the lucky one. At least he won’t remember this funeral.”

“I need to talk to you,” Richard said. “I need to know exactly what Joanna said to you in the ER.”

“If you’re worried about what Mandrake said, forget it. He’s lying,” Vielle said. “Joanna never voluntarily said two words to him in her life, let alone that NDEs were a message from the Other Side.”

“I know that,” he said impatiently. “I need to know what she said to you.”

“There’s no point in torturing yourself over—”

“The exact words. It’s important.”

She looked curiously at him. “Did something happen?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. What did she say? Exactly.”

“She said, ‘Tell Richard,’ ” Vielle said, squinting in her effort to remember. “ ‘It’s…’ The resident was trying to start an airway, and she waved him away. And then, ‘SOS. SOS.’ ”

He grabbed a pen out of his pocket and scribbled the words on the order of service. “ ‘Tell Richard… it’s… SOS, SOS,’ ” he said. “Is that all?”

“Yes. No. Just before that, she grabbed for my hand and said, ‘Important.’ ”

Important.

“Are you okay?” Vielle said.

“Yeah,” he said, staring at the order of service. Tell Richard it’s… what? What had she been trying to tell him when they interrupted her to put the airway in?

“Look, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be alone right now,” Vielle said, “especially after that travesty of a funeral.” She glared across the room at Mandrake and Joanna’s sister. “Some of us from the ER are going to go get something to eat. Why don’t you come with us?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve got to get back to the hospital.” He walked quickly out into the parking lot and caught a ride with Mrs. Dirksen from Personnel.

“Wasn’t that a beautiful sermon?” she asked him. “I loved the music.”

“Umm,” Richard said, not listening. Tell Richard it’s… Important. She had been trying to tell him something. Something important.

But what if he was confabulating? Manipulating her words so he didn’t have to face the fact that she had called out to him for help? “The problem with NDEs is, there’s no way to obtain outside confirmation,” Joanna had said.

“And Mr. Mandrake’s eulogy was just wonderful,” Mrs. Dirksen said. She pulled into the hospital parking lot. “Didn’t you think so?”

“Thanks for the ride,” Richard said and dashed up the shortcut to the lab.

He pushed a chair over against the cabinet, climbed up on it, and reached his arm over the edge, feeling far back. There was nothing there. He patted around the top of the cabinet with the flat of his hand and then reached all the way back to the wall and swept his hand along the edge.

It was a piece of cardboard. He scooted it forward with his fingers till he could pick it up. It was a postcard of a tropical sunset, garish pink and red and gold, with palm trees silhouetted against the bright orange ocean. He turned it over, half afraid of what it would say, but it wasn’t Joanna’s handwriting.

Up at the top someone had written in a clear, spiky hand, one under the other, “ Pretty Woman, Remember the Titans, What Lies Beneath.” The other hand, not Joanna’s either, was a barely legible scrawl. He couldn’t read the signature, and he had a hard time reading the message. “Having a wonderful time,” it said. “Wish you were here.”

A message from the dead.

He got down off the chair, plugged in the phone, and found Kit Gardiner’s number. “Kit,” he said when she answered. “I need you to come to the hospital. And bring the book.”